How traffic flow models calibration influence fuel consumption estimation?

convenient way to assess the traffic fuel consumption is to couple a microscopic traffic flow model with an instantaneous emission model. Traffic models are usually calibrated using goodness of fit indicators that are related to the traffic behaviour. Thus, this paper aims to investigate how the traffic model calibration influences the accuracy of fuel consumption estimation. Two traffic models are investigated: the Newell’s and the Gipps’s model. It appears that the Gipps’s model globally provides more accurate fuel consumption estimation than the Newell’s model. For both models, the fuel consumption estimation of a single vehicle is very sensitive to the calibration. This is confirmed by a global sensitivity analysis of the Gipp’s model that shows that non optimal parameters significantly increase the variance of the outputs. Fortunately, this is no longer the case when the fuel consumption of a whole platoon is calculated. In fact, using global mean value for the traffic model parameters lead to errors lower than 3% when estimation the consumption of a platoon of ten vehicles.